A successful business is often the product of an effective marketing strategy. As a business owner, you have to carefully evaluate each marketing strategy consistently to ensure that you are still getting the best results. This implies that some strategies that worked in 2020 may not produce the same result in 2021.
Since we are barely into the new year, it is not too late for you to develop an effective marketing strategy in 2021. To help you achieve this, we have put below some tips to help you create a marketing strategy that will work in 2021.
1. Carefully Evaluate Previous Strategies
The first step to embarking on a journey is realising where you are. Hence, the first step to creating an effective marketing strategy in 2021 is evaluating your 2020 strategies. This is the moment of truth for you as a business owner.
To effectively do this, you will need to do the following things or ask yourself the following questions:
• Write down your business goals for the previous year.
• Were you able to achieve all of them?
• If so, how many of your business successes in 2020 were due to your marketing strategies?
• Write down every marketing strategy you made use of in the previous year.
• Highlight the ones that worked.
2. Keep Your Target Audience in Mind
An effective marketing strategy has to be developed with your target audience in mind. You will need to ask yourself if your previous marketing strategies were developed with your target audience in mind.
Do you have a clear cut idea about your target audience? You need to clearly define your target audience to create an effective marketing strategy in 2021.
Also, you need to find out:
• Where your target audience gets their news.
• The kind of apps they use often.
• Innovative ways of connecting with them.
• How you can improve how you are reaching them.
3. Develop New Business Goals
After you have evaluated your 2020 goals and marketing strategies, the next step is to begin planning for 2021. Write down your 2021 business goals. What do you hope to achieve, and how far do you hope to go as a business?
To effectively drive your marketing strategy in 2021, you will need to make sure that your business goals are:
• Specific: Be direct and precise.
• Measureable: Avoid ambiguity when drawing your business goals. Only set goals that you can track when working towards achieving them.
• Attainable: Be optimistic but also realistic. Don’t set goals that would be impossible to achieve at the current stage of your business.
• Relevant: Only set goals that will move your business forward. Avoid the temptation of setting goals that will add little or no value to your business.
• Timely: Always set a deadline for each of your goals.
4. Start Thinking About Tactics
Now that you have your 2021 business goals, it is time to start thinking about the tactics to include in your marketing strategy. Here, you have to brainstorm and identify innovative ways to achieve your business goals. For every goal, you have to identify specific action steps needed to help you achieve them.
For instance, if your business goals are to increase your website traffic by 15%, you will have to:
• Upload content with SEO principles in mind
• Share your blog posts across your social media handles and encourage your employees to do the same.
• Create a social media ad campaign that links people to your website.
5. Work Within Your Budget
Achieving your business goals is as important as developing them. So, you need to keep your resources in mind when developing your marketing strategy. How much time can you invest it in without affecting business operations? How much can your business afford to invest in your marketing strategy for 2021?
Working within what you can afford may reduce how much you can achieve. However, it will help you focus on unique tactics to ensure that you achieve the goals that matter.
6. Develop Your Marketing Strategy
An effective way to do this is to write every month in 2021 in a book. Underneath each month, write the business tactics you intend to deploy at that time. For example, if you want to increase your website engagement by 15%, you can write, “share blog posts on all social media handles in March. Under April, you can write, “start a social media ad campaign “.
The list you just developed contains your marketing strategies for 2021. Be thorough and detailed when writing your tactics so that anyone that reads them can easily understand. If you have a team, write the name of the person or people sharing each responsibility and let them know what is expected of them.
According to Julien Raby, in an article written by Lisa Smith for The WordStream Blog, one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies for 2021 is Email Marketing. However, he further stated that this marketing strategy’s efficiency lies solely in your customer list’s quality and size.
7. Inspect Your Analytics
Keep track of your progress and the efficiency of your marketing strategy in 2021. Check your click-through-rates, Google Analytics, Email-open, etc., to see how far you’ve come and how well you are doing.
Have a thorough mid-year review. You can then shift your focus from overperforming marketing strategies to the underperforming ones.
Conclusion
Now that you have developed your marketing strategy for 2021, it is time to take action. Having a marketing strategy is useless if all it will do is decorate your desk or wall. This is the time to step out of your comfort zone and commit yourself to achieving your business goals.
The goal isn’t just to achieve your business goals but to do so within the deadlines you have set. Staying committed to your marketing strategy in 2021 will help you stay focused on achieving your business goals. You can add your marketing strategies to your calendar or a planner on your phone and set frequent reminders to help keep you focused at all times.